On 10/05/2020 18:36, Colin Finck wrote:

I haven't seen torrents widely used for open source software distribution for at least a decade.

Torrents are common from what I have seen. Offhand, I can think of Debian <https://www.debian.org/distrib/>, Ubuntu <https://ubuntu.com/download/alternative-downloads#bittorrents> and Mint <https://linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=274> who all offer official torrents.

I've been doing quite a bit of downloading of open source operating systems recently since I've been testing various OSs and I have to say that I have commonly found official torrents to be faster overall than most mirrors.

If you have a torrent client handy (as a random example the Brave browser includes a torrent client) then torrents can be as easy to use as HTTP download links.

-- 
Mark Rousell